Like the title of Jenny Molberg’s Refusal, the reader’s initial reaction is to refuse this agonizing, electric work because of the pain the “I” lays open. But it’s impossible to stop reading because of the raw exposure and bravery that leap off the page. The first poem, “Note,” begins the […]
“What is the right time to announce you’re named after your dead sister?” asks Kristin Czarnecki, professor of English at Georgetown College, in her hybrid memoir/literary excavation into sibling loss, The First Kristin: The Story of a Naming. The author has known all her life that she is named for […]
When one acquires and reads a Yusef Komunyakaa collection, expectations range from the philosophical to the spiritual, from the musical to the political. In Komunyakaa’s beautifully collated Night Animals, readers receive not only the usual Komunyakaa fare, but also visual treats from artist Rachel Bliss, which add a Bosch-like bent […]
“The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved,” claimed the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz. In Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s powerful fourth collection, Seeing the Body, that beloved is her mother, to whom the book is dedicated. This mother (and her life, illness, death, and memory) becomes the powerful […]
If you open Danielle Vogel’s book, Edges & Fray, a few pages in, you’ll see on the left-hand page three square photographs of birds’ nests, and on the right-hand side syntactical fragments including, “a book arrives in threads—.” As the interrelation of nest-building and text-composing emerges, we become privy […]
Consider the materials from which an arrow can be made: wood, aluminum, carbon, fiberglass. Each material used to construct an arrow ultimately serves the arrow’s intended purpose. Now think of poems as arrows, gathered into a quiver for safe-harboring until their use. These poem-arrows rest, unused until the poet or […]
Since briefly working with Laura van den Berg on a story of my own years ago, I have admired her flourishing career and devoured her work as it is released. She is one of those writers whose work makes me feel that I become a better writer myself through mere […]
With such a title as She-Giant in the Land of Here-We-Go-Again, maybe it would be best for you, the reader, to pull a blanket over your head and read in dim light, to try to see something with pure sight, undiluted by what you already know, undulating to the sound […]
Fiction overlays fact and past folds into present in Tina Barry’s prose poetry collection Beautiful Raft, an imagined narrative based on the real-life story of the relationship between artists Marc Chagall and Virginia Haggard in the mid-1940s. Upon moving to High Falls, New York, Barry and her husband discover that […]
It is truly an honor to introduce this new poem by Heather McHugh. McHugh is like no other writer working today. In her understated, yet syntactically rebellious, poem, she uses what seem at first like small stylistic decisions to make startling and necessary claims about gender, form, and academia. In […]
